The recently retired Kepler space mission detected just under 6,000 possible planets and discovered over 2,600 confirmed planets, all within a small patch of our Milky Way galaxy. From this we can infer that our galaxy alone should contain billions of planets, of which some 10 billion could potentially be habitable. And even within our own solar system, the planet Mars and some of Saturn’s and Jupiter’s moons have been identified as places that might harbor life. So now a myriad of possible targets await us in the search for life beyond planet earth.